Best effort Internet: which sounds very similar to the eSpeed problems on yesteryear

My bandwidth at home cannot even reach 1Mbps, is there a rebate?

There will be no rebate given on your rental charge or quota. Our broadband service is best effort service. If your average broadband speed is low (approximately one megabit per second or less) we do not recommend you to purchase higher bandwidth or quota packages.

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Telbru recently joined the Twitter sphere (@Telbru) and I hope this is part of them getting their act together and telling the customers what’s going on. I believe anybody living in Brunei knows how much people dislike the e-Speed (and now the Zoom!) experience. Complaints of slow speeds and connectivity issues are always heard every few days it seems. Sometimes Telbru will respond and other times not, but honestly they need to be more transparent in what they are doing. The same goes for all their other services; as goes with my Speed on Demand findings, there often is no official word on what is happening.

Maybe it’s just me but having a problem and not being told what is being done really annoys me. If you tell me what is being done or even if you tell me why it can’t be done, I will be more understanding. Just say something and treat your customer right by give them information they deserve. You can tell us that you are doing nothing but only if you have valid reasons (not excuses). Reach out and communicate with your customers. As mentioned before they recently started with Twitter (@Telbru) and slightly with Facebook (Telbru 4 U). I initially thought the eSpeed forum would have been a place for Telbru to communicate with their customers but alas it is not – no updates since June 2008.

Recently people were complaining that the eSpeed Upgrade was a joke because:

There was no improvement for them (the typical complaints: eSpeed not working and/or slow)

Their line was not yet upgraded even up till now (over 2 weeks since they announced the upgrade)

Recently it is supposed that peer-to-peer (P2P) in the form of bittorrent has been blocked

After some probing Telbru told me that they are rolling out the upgrades to different sections at a time and people will get them in due time. This information needs to be stated somewhere online from their official source. Just advertising that they have upgraded when in fact people have still yet to get an upgrade will just lead to further discontentment among those who did not get the upgrade: leading to them complaining about eSpeed being a joke in this case.

The official word is that they are not blocking bittorrent but users are still complaining of it not being to download properly. Initially I torrented an Ubuntu 9.04 ISO a few weeks back and it seemed to have no connections so I left it overnight and in the morning it managed to finish downloading but my total upload was 0. I suspect that somewhere in the early morning they unblock torrents when the traffic is low and continue blocking it in the morning. There has to be a reason for the upload to be 0 because previously it was fine. More recently I torrented Ubuntu 10.04 and it managed to fully download via torrent and it did manage to upload, however it did take 30 minutes to actually connect to peers and start downloading.

On a related note of discontentment with Telbru, their SpeedOnDemand service (logon page available only to newer networks) which has been advertised in October last year and recently in March this year, is still not available for all users, only those on the newer network. There is still no product service page on the eSpeed website and the only information I have on SpeedOnDemand is from what I gathered from asking them questions and I have documented in my posts here and here.

It seems to be that with the upgrade advert and the SpeedOnDemand service it seems that they are trying to grab people’s attention by introducing something new hoping to get the public’s support. Which they will initially get. But once customers try it out and find out that they can’t access it, they will get more frustrated with Telbru.

Honestly Telbru I give you kudos to setting up your twitter account and actively trying to get into contact with people having issues with eSpeed but you need to do more to get the public faith back. I’m sure the public perception of Telbru from the constant eSpeed and Zoom! complaints isn’t that great. I myself didn’t have much faith in Telbru with my on eSpeed issues – traffic bottleneck causing difficulty in surfing at home with lots of timeouts despite constant connectivity and having to renew IP every day after returning from work. I am happy after switching to the new Alcatel modem from the old Huawei modem which resulted in a constant and consistent connection with the combination of the eSpeed upgrade.

In order to improve I suggest that that Telbru give press releases or official information documenting what they are doing and to stop with any of the advertising that gives false hope to or misleads customers. Let us know and be transparent of the repair works or roll out works that are currently underway or are planned and the estimated time of completion. If anybody is like me, knowing what is happening will allow me to be more tolerable of any issues rather than being kept in the dark. I suggest they continue with something like their eSpeed forum giving FAQs, possible solutions as well as updates on their works. Telbru I wish you the best and hope you do this right.

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With the recent changes with eSpeed you’d like to know if you’ve been upgraded so here are 2 local bandwidth test sites that should enable you to check your bandwidth with between you and Telbru (and DST possibly)

Note that these will show you local link within Brunei and just because your local link has the full bandwidth doesn’t necessarily mean that all your downloads will get the full speed of connection. To check the speed with the outside world try bandwidth testers like Speedtest.net.

After reading a friend’s Tweet I ran into Telbru’s promotion on their Speed on Demand service. I decided to give them a ring to find out whether it is available to all eSpeed users as based on previous findings it was only available to some.

Speed on Demand Promo : 15-31 March

So basically I found out that users with a modem/router WAN IP starting with 119 (IP 119.*.*.*) are actually applicable for the Speed on Demand service. They are still undergoing upgrading and maintenance work for other IP ranges and intending to migrate 61.*.*.* users to 119.*.*.*.

So finally some clarification from Telbru on this matter. And the speculation that it was for newer users on a specific network was correct. Sad that there is no official press release and that this information has to be continually dug up rather than presented by the folks over at Telbru. With the redesigned of the eSpeed website, here’s hoping to a new year with a change in how Telbru handles their public relations and information delivery.

PS: On a side note thanks to Bahrin (I hope thats the right spelling) for taking my call at the 121 hotline and giving me this much needed clarification and information. Kudos to you and you made my day by finally speaking to a courteous, competent and well informed person =)

Ever since bmobile and DST launched their mobile broadband offerings (Zoom! and Go!)I was interested to see which one offered the best deal. I’ve had a few weeks with the bmobile’s Zoom! service using the older modem with 3.6Mbps max speeds and did some speed tests and real world tests. In the real world tests it got frustrating at times with quite a few timeouts and YouTube videos loading only to stop loading half way. Real world download tests weren’t fantastic, typically under 512kbps which is even slower than the lowest tier E-Speed plan. My regular locations were at home in Jalan Kebangsaan Lama, and at the old airport road which is basically just across Telbru Headquarters. After a while I found out that doing a regular speed test at Speedtest.net was not giving optimal results, I would get less than 300kbps (~40KB/s) download speeds but in actual fact when I download podcasts I would get over 500kbps (~60KB/s) easily.

I found that if I do multiple downloads/connections I would be able to get faster speeds. I was able to roughly max out the modem to the full 3.6Mbps connection (but that was close to Telbru, not at home). At home torrenting some music off Jamendo managed to get up to 100KB/s but it was not consistent. Below shows a torrent downloading at over 200KB/s.

I know location and people/connection saturation are important factors for any mobile broadband connections and honestly I’m pretty jealous of David Cheok’s reports on his Go! getting goodspeeds in Subok

“actually.. have been getting avg 500KB daily.. last night was good coz it broke 700KB..” (via Twitter)

He also went on to say the following statement which I totally agree with:

That also brings me to another important fact that Go! seems to have pretty bad upload speeds (up to 20x less than Zoom!). If you’re planning on uploading photos or doing some streaming video from your webcam or even Skype, Go! may not be the answer you’re looking for. For anything to do with uploads, stick to E-Speed or Zoom!